Weekly Web Round-Up: Week of April 5, 2013

Our favorite part of Friday, besides the weekend and two full days to spend with the family, is the Weekly Web Round-Up. And since it’s beautiful outside, I hope you’re reading this week’s edition outside on your tablet, smartphone, or laptop—I know that if I had a laptop here, I’d be compiling this while sitting outside. This week we’ve included how one mother fought bullying on Instagram, photos of children with their most prized possession, a 9-year-old Socrates, and, in honor of Autism Awareness Month, a post about understanding autism.

Do you know what beauty contests on Instagram are? It’s when someone posts a grid of four girls and Instagram users vote the “ugly” girls out until only the “prettiest” girl is left. Hollee Actman Becker, author of suburbabble.com, recently wrote about it on Huffington Post—she was going through her daughter’s Instagram feed and found one. Read below (and here) to find out what she did to combat this form of bullying and how it took off.

My first instinct was to block all the girls who had posted the grids from my daughter’s account.

But here’s the thing.

These girls were friends of my daughter’s who had been in my car, at my parties, in my house. They liked to dance, and sing camp songs and bake brownies. They weren’t Heathers. Or Reginas. Or even Monas. And if you don’t know who Mona is, you need to go watch an ep of PLL like, now.

These were good, sweet, funny girls who I knew and who I liked. …

And so instead of banishing the girls, I did this:

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti shot his Toy Story project—photos of children around the world with their most prized possession—over a period of 18 months. “Galimberti explores the universality of being a kid amidst the diversity of the countless corners of the world; saying, “at their age, they are pretty all much the same; they just want to play.” But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country.”

Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi

When Zia Hassan, a Washington, D.C.-based musician, blogger, teacher-in-training, and video cameraman, picked his fiancee up from her babysitting gig, he started talking to the oldest boy. What ensued was a conversation about the meaning of life. Watch the video below to hear the young philosophers thoughts.

Is your child on the autism spectrum? Do you know a child who is on the autism spectrum? If you answered “no” to those two questions, you may not know what it might be like for that child to experience every day things. Melanie Potock wrote a post called “Understanding Autism: Restaurant Meltdown” over at GalTime. She writes about a dining-out meltdown a boy had a a restaurant because of the fries he was served.

I sat in a popular restaurant chain and watched an 8 year old boy have a major meltdown at his table. His mother cringed as lunch time patrons stared. An irritated couple at a nearby booth got up and moved, but only after glaring at the mother. I’ll be honest, the child was upsetting my lunch too, but one thing I suspected was that this child had autism. He appeared to be just like any other child, but the intensity of his outburst was out of proportion to the issue he was yelling about: The waiter had served him waffle fries and he had expected “skinny fries” just like the french fries served at home.

For more perspective on what it might be like to live with autism, read Ariane Zurcher’s essay, Imagine.